For a moment or more the silence is painfully intense. You can hear hearts beat like the ticking of French clocks made in Rotterdam by a Swede. In the recesses of each chest, "boots and saddles" is sounded at frequent intervals. But outward silence reigns, as when a young woman, purple with throbbing timidity and expectant bashfulness, stands before her lover, uncertain whether he will lisp his love, or switch off to a side track and discuss the January thaw. Silence is golden and toothsome and restful. But it can not last forever. It breaks. It breaks like a monetary stringency tapped with clearing-house certificates. The colonel now looms, the crowning pride of all this display. Behold, ye gathered multitude of non-combatives. Behold and tremble! His sword of sharpness, gift from admiring neighbors over at Goslin's lane, unsheathed after valorous struggles, swings clumsily to a perpendicular. Excalibur's fit prototype, as emblem of authority and fruitful of coming slaughters, is revealed. Hear, oh! post-office, and give ear, all ye blacksmith shops. Great Mars, his son, has sway. Mock him not! Madness that way lies, or worse. Cheer and the crowd cheers with you; laugh and you laugh in the guard-house. Such being the case, nobody cares to laugh. Napoleon called attention to the fact that forty centuries were perched on the pyramids to umpire one of his fights. More centuries than that are here to see and note. And the colonel proceeds to make a few remarks. He is in a remarkful mood, but his style is dry and sententious. He is not one of those authors who swell the bowels of their books with empty wind. His remarks are meaningful. At home he was chief in the rosebud garden of oratory, but it is not his cue, on the present occasion, to get into a wrestling match with reckless word-trippers. He does all the talking himself. Spherical, sonorous vocables, the well-conned phrases of command, roll out upon the quivering air, and smite the multitudinous ear of this battalion with a startling sense of impotency. The multitudinous arm reaches out in nervous effort at obedience. But on divergent lines the effort doth its energy expend, and the results are simply marvelous. Melodramatic entanglements and perplexities tread on each other's heels, like candidates for patrimony at the obsequies of a plutocrat. Errors grotesque as hippogriffs impinge on errors plaintive as threnodies in minor E. A woman of the impressionist school, who cooks in a chafing dish, and prescribes reform ball costumes of high-neck gown, long sleeves and mittens, is very appropriately registered from Boston. A school girl in the same city wrote in her composition: "The boy thinks himself smart because he can wade where it is deep, but God made the dry land for every living thing, and rested on the seventh day." No calligraph below the regulation Boston standard will suffice fully to portray the errors and horrors of this Dress Parade.